Differentiation of cured cooked hams by physico-chemical properties and chemometrics

Comparison of physico-chemical and compositional traits was carried out on cooked hams. Deboned fresh pig thighs of three different origins were divided into three batches: 200 pig thighs from the Italian market, H1; 200 from The Netherlands, H2; and 200 from Denmark, H3. Boneless pig thighs were processed under commercial guidelines for production of cooked hams, using brine at 25% level of injection. After processing, 12 cooked hams from each batch were sampled randomly and analyzed for proximate and fatty acid composition. Color measurement was performed on the muscles: biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus. H1 hams showed a higher weight loss and a lower technological yield compared to H2 and H3 hams. Analysis of variance on compositional data showed that H1 hams had a lower moisture/protein ratio, a higher fat content, a lower percentage of a-linolenic, eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acid, and a higher percentage of myristic and palmitic acids when compared to H2 and H3 hams (P 0.05). Analysis of color of the three muscles demonstrated that hams from the H1 group had the highest a* values. The application of linear discriminant analysis demonstrated that the use of only four variables allowed to correctly discriminate among groups of cooked hams.